[WikiEN-l] Another sourcing problem

[Carcharoth]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 5:11 AM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:

<snip>

> And even this excuse doesn't work for the Bradley example.  Having only one
> side of a dispute because one side of the dispute is a published author and
> can more easily get her side published in a reliable source certainly isn't
> "arcana".

There is a similar distortion of the record as "seen on Wikipedia" in
terms of images as well. I've long held the view that it is important
to present a balanced visual record of a subject in a Wikipedia
article, both in terms of what is presented in the article and what is
linked to elsewhere (including galleries of images on Commons and
external links).

One of the problems, though, is that the founding principle that
content must be freely licensed has resulted in large swathes of
images being declared forbidden (because you would need to pay to use
them and you couldn't freely redistribute them). There are also
freedom of panorama considerations that lead to many images being
excluded that many people not familiar with how this varies from
country to country expressing surprise that pictures of modern statues
and buildings in public places in some countries are not allowed on
Commons.

What this results in is a strange absence of some pictures you might
expect to see in an article, and a preponderance of images from free
sources (such as the US government, the Australian government, and
various other source). But for some countries, this is missing. Thus
some articles that you would expect to see illustrated by images from
the history of that country are instead illustrated by whatever can be
found in free sources from other countries, or very old images rather
than more recent ones.

So people looking at the images in Wikipedia might notice an absence
of certain types of images and a preponderance of pictures from US
sources instead. Most of the time this is not a problem, but in some
cases I think it can distort the record. Kind of like breaching NPOV
for the visual record. The balance can be redressed by including
external links to other images from other sources, but it still feels
like rather than selecting the *best* pictures to illustrate
something, the images chosen are the best of the *free* images. My
view has always been that if there is a better, non-free image, it
should be mentioned in the article and linked to in a reference or
external link, not just ignored until it becomes free.

This is why I was saying that information in borderline sources could
be mentioned in an external link or a footnote or as an aside in a
reference. Of the three, I think providing an external link and
letting the reader follow it and make up their own mind is best.

Carcharoth